All essays, newest first

In 1802, a country parson argued that a watch implies a watchmaker. In 1986, Richard Dawkins replied: the watchmaker exists, but has no eyes. In February 2026, a 45-nucleotide molecule in a Cambridge laboratory may have quietly turned the argument into a laboratory finding.

Seventy years of a race no one declared. A history of what silicon has learned to do, the mechanism behind its progress, and the first research finding that it may have begun to behave differently when it believes it is being watched.

Your grandmother knew things she could not write down. Most of them are gone — and the forgetting started long before globalization.

Twenty-one people lay in a scanner looking at paintings. Their brains disagreed about which were beautiful — but agreed on where beauty lives.

A mouse in a cage picks a mystery over a meal. A fish's curiosity is written in a single letter of DNA. And the brain region that makes you wonder is the same one that registers pain.

We have better maps of Mars than of our own ocean floor. The question is not just what we haven't found — it's why we stopped looking.

There is a temperature at which a healthy young adult, sitting perfectly still in the shade, will die. That number is lower than you think.

In the 1950s, Nikolaas Tinbergen built fake eggs more vivid than anything in nature. The birds preferred them. We are the birds now.

It takes less than a fifth of a second. Before you have chosen to look, your brain has already decided what it wants.

Stress is not an event. It is an accumulation — and your body keeps a ledger that your mind never sees.

30,000,000,000,000 cells make up your body. Not one of them is you.

Do the math. The universe is 13.8 billion years old. You will live, if you are lucky, for about 80 of them.